Mexico’s Latest Cash Crisis Creates Rift on Revolucion : ‘They look humble, but they earn a lot of money--more money than us’

Equipped with an armful of jewelry, Adelaida Avila Garcia and two other Mixtec Indian women marched down Avenida Revolucion, hoping for sales, but expecting confrontation. They sold no jewelry on the kitschy tourist drag, but they got plenty of confrontation.

“Vayanse para abajo! Vayanse para abajo!” a competing jewelry peddler ordered the women as he nudged them toward a side street, away from the profitable tourist trade on the avenue. “Go below! Go below!”

“We have a right to live, too!” replied the feisty Avila, a tiny bundle of energy with a high-pitched voice who was clad in the multicolored clothing favored by the Indian women. “We have a right to survive!”

This daily drama, common lately along Avenida Revolucion, reflects a wider battle being waged on the bawdy thoroughfare, a sometimes-rancorous dispute little noticed by the throngs of U.S. tourists whose dollars are at the heart of the matter. It is a conflict involving turf and economics, but it is being played out amid charges of discrimination against the Indian women.

Hundreds of Women

On one side of the issue are the hundreds of impoverished Indian saleswomen--seen on city streets throughout Mexico and universally known as Las Marias, a term they consider offensive--who for years have hawked their wares along Revolution Avenue, often accompanied by their children.

Opposing the women are established, city-licensed and often politically influential vendors who resent the competition from the women, shove them off the street, characterize them as an eyesore, and are now pressuring municipal officials to move them to other areas of the city.

At stake is unfettered access to the dollars of tourists from the United States and elsewhere who frequent the bar-laden avenue. With Mexico mired in its deepest economic crisis in half a century, tourism--Tijuana’s principal industry--has assumed even greater importance.

Apart from its economics, the dispute here underlines broader divisions in Mexican society, which many American visitors view as homogeneous but that actually is composed of many different racial groups. Rich in culture but poor in worldly possessions, many pure-blooded Indian groups such as the Mixtecs, natives of the poor interior state of Oaxaca, often feel victimized by the dominant mestizos, those of mixed Indian and Spanish blood.

‘We’re Mexicans, Too’

“We’re Mexicans, too,” said Avila, using a phrase oft-repeated by Indian leaders. “We have a right to make a living.”

Charges that the Mixtecs are victims of racial prejudice have flown anew in the current dispute. And the critics of the Indian saleswomen have raised old myths--the women work to support drunken husbands; they rent out their children and send them out to beg--that the Indians’ defenders say are false stereotypes of the kind once widely used against blacks and other minorities in the United States.

“Of course discrimination is at work here,” said Victor Clark Alfaro, a mestizo anthropologist who heads a human rights group in Tijuana and has been a longtime defender of the Mixtec community. “No one recognizes the rights of the women to sell their goods, even though some have been there for 20 years or more.”

Such charges of discrimination touch a raw nerve in Mexico, where nationalistic officials frequently invoke the country’s proud Indian heritage. Illustrating the importance of Mexico’s Indian past are the many representations of Cuauhtemoc, the last Aztec emperor,

whose likeness is ubiquitous in Mexico. A statue of the former Aztec leader dominates a portion of Tijuana’s developed river zone.

“There are no first-class and second-class citizens here,” said Jesus Ramon Gil, chief spokesman for Tijuana Mayor Federico Valdes. “We are all Mexicans.”

Discrimination Denied

The current dispute is not about discrimination, Gil said, but merely a question of providing an orderly flow of commerce along Revolution Avenue.

“They (the women) have a right to work,” he said. “We respect that. But they have to work within the rules.”

Translation: If they don’t have permits, which few do, the Indian women must leave the avenue.

While City Hall doesn’t see any signs of prejudice in that stance, others disagree.

“It’s true we’re not second-class citizens; we’re fifth-class,” said Jose Gonzalez, a resident of San Bernardino who heads a Mixtec Indian group in the Los Angeles area. “The Mexican government says it is concerned for human rights in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua. What about in Mexico? They don’t respect our human rights.”

Protest Scheduled Today

In response to the current controversy in Tijuana, Gonzalez said, Mixtec Indians plan to protest today outside the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles.

The debate about the vendors’ place here arises every few years or so in Tijuana, usually as a new city administration begins yet another cleanup campaign. In past years, the women say they have been arrested, fined, had their goods confiscated, and have even been gathered up and transported away from the city. They fear such drastic action again, although city officials vow it won’t come to that.

Whatever the outcome, Adelaida Avila and her colleagues say they have been largely shut out in recent weeks from the major tourist strip of Revolution Avenue. The women say the money they earn--perhaps $10 on a good day--is essential to their families, which are generally large and extended. The women want the city to guarantee them access to the avenue, perhaps issuing permits allowing them to sell there legally.

“I have four children in school; they need pens, notebooks, supplies. They need to eat. How else can I support them?” asked Florencia Olea Gomez, a 40-year-old mother of 11 who sat frustrated on a recent afternoon in a small park at the northern end of Revolution, her trinkets placed in her lap. On this day, she said, she had sold nothing.

Families Stick Together

Her story is similar to those offered by other Mixtec women interviewed: Olea came to Tijuana almost 20 years ago with her family. She resides in a section of a sprawling neighborhood known as the Colonia Obrera, where several thousand Mixtec Indian families live in proximity, many of them former neighbors in the isolated rural communities of Oaxaca. Unlike many of her comadres, or female colleagues, Olea speaks good Spanish, along with her native Mixtec tongue.

Olea said her husband is a construction worker, but he earns only slightly more than the minimum wage--somewhat more than $4 a day at current exchange rates. (Many other Mixtec men work in the fields of California and northern Mexico.) To supplement her husband’s income, Olea said, she has been selling trinkets on the avenue for more than a dozen years.

“I want my children to better themselves, to learn how to read, to write,” she said. “I myself never learned to read or write. I want them to learn good Spanish.”

Speaking with the mestizo vendors and merchants who dominate Revolution Avenue, it is clear that many do not accept the striving, hard-working image the women present of themselves and their families. Many merchants routinely accuse the Mixtec men of being lazy drunkards, and charge that the women deliberately keep children out of school to beg. While some Mixtec children undoubtedly do beg, the women say such examples are in the minority.

Charges of Child Renting

Jose Luis Portillo Zamora, a past president of the merchants association of Revolution Avenue and current vice president for tourism of the national Chamber of Commerce in Tijuana, charged that Mixtec mothers rent out their children to other Mixtec women who are eager to increase their sympathy appeal to tourists. He characterized the women as the instruments of their men.

“They (the men) have control over the women,” said Portillo, who owns a gift shop on the avenue. “Certain ethnic groups exist; the men have three or four wives, and they send the women and children out to work . . . They exist in the United States, too.”

Portillo says he is concerned about the image the women present. It is a frequently heard comment among businessmen in extremely image-conscious Tijuana, where city fathers are anxious to shed the border city’s traditional reputation as an enclave of vice and corruption and present it as a thriving center of international tourism and commerce.

“We don’t want tourists coming here and taking pictures of Las Marias and saying, ‘These are Mexicans,’ ” Portillo said.

Relocation Sought

However, he insisted that he is not against the women. Rather, he, like city officials, said they should be moved to other areas of the city where they can sell their goods.

“We can’t possibly have 200 to 300 Mixtec women selling on Revolution Avenue, each with three or four children,” said David Gutierrez, Tijuana’s coordinator for street peddlers. “There are many other areas where they can sell. Tijuana has grown, but Revolution Avenue hasn’t.”

However, Gutierrez acknowledged that no other areas are as potentially lucrative as Revolution, with its loud cantinas, liquor stores, clothing outlets and other tourist attractions.

“They want to push us somewhere where there are no tourists, where there is no one but poor people who won’t buy anything from us,” Olea said.

Doesn’t Like Competition

On a recent afternoon, Julio Cesar Torres, a licensed 37-year-old street vendor, directed three Mixtec vendors away from Revolution Avenue. Torres, who sells chains, bracelets and other jewelry from a felt-lined case slung over his shoulders with a leather strap, said he didn’t appreciate the competition.

“They (the women) look humble, but they earn a lot of money--more money than us,” said Torres, a father of four who has been selling on the street for 15 years. “Let them go someplace else. We have to support our families too . . . Where are their husbands? What do they do with their money? I understand they have nice houses in the south.”

Back in the Mixtec quarter of the Colonia Obrera, Adelaida Avila showed a visitor the simple house of plywood and tar paper where her daughter Maria Guadalupe Vidal lives with her husband, her mother-in-law, two sisters in-law and two of their own children. Their two-room home is reached via a tortuous path from an unpaved road, a 15-minute ride from downtown.

Guadalupe, who is expecting her third child, also sells trinkets on the street, including cloth bracelets and birds she knits at home. Her husband also works in construction. There is no running water in the house; cooking is done on an open fire outside the front door; an outhouse serves as a bathroom.

Raised Seven Children

“They say we have so much money, that we’re rich and have big houses,” said Avila, who has raised seven children and, like many Mixtec women, looks to be well beyond her 39 years. She stood inside her daughter’s house.

“This is how we live--humbly. Do you think I’d be suffering out on the streets, selling every day, if I didn’t have to do it for my family? What do you think?”

We feel we have as much right to live and sell our goods as anyone else,” she said. “Just because we’re from the south doesn’t mean we don’t have the same rights as other Mexicans. We only want to survive.”